Description:

This talk takes a linguist and semiotic anthropological approach to racial self-identification practices ofmestizos in Peru. An investigation of how second generation urbanites reflect on their racial identities reveals that class and race may not be two separate axes of experience, but entirely co-constitutive, encapsulated by the phrase “la plata blanquea” (“money whitens”). It ends with a reflection on what avenues this opens for thinking decolonization, and which it may foreclose.

Diego is a postdoctoral fellow in the Buffett Institute and received his PhD from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania in 2018. He is a linguistic and cultural anthropologist; his research centers on the production and circulation of history via linguistic and discursive strategies in interaction.